The dark fantastic

TO YOU, DAD

AUTHOR'S NOTE

In my great-grandmother's house in Indiana, shortly after the close of the Civil War, a series of extraordinary events transpired which were never satisfactorily explained. The house was renowned for its hospitality and witnesses were not lacking to testify to the strange disturbances which in timehave tobecame a legend.

Those disturbances are recorded in this novel as the subjective experience of one of the characters, and to that extent the work is founded on fact; but the story is fictitious and the people in no sense represent real persons living or dead.

THE DARK FANTASTIC

... the name of truth,

Are ye fantastical, or that indeed

Which outwardly ye show?"

CHAPTER 1

Candles were still used to light one to bed; kerosene lamps still exploded. Stagecoaches made six miles an hour, and one traveled by rail at the risk of one's neck. Gentlemen wore greatcoats instead of overcoats, and male quartets sang "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh." Hoops were going out, bustles were not yet in, but ladies achieved quite as telling effect with tight lacing and lasers of petticoats. The war referred to in conversation was not World War II,

Conversation, however, held a not unfamiliar ring. Returned veterans complained that civilians had all the jobs. The older generation complained that the younger generation was going to the devil. The younger generation retorted that they had inherited a world which their elders had treated like H. Dumpty's egg and now expected them to put together again. Barring a few of Mr. Edison's inventions and the fact that the Republican party was in power, times were not so very different then from now.

There was the usual post war wave of spiritualism; the usual postwar depression. Eggs were selling at ten cents a dozen; butter at eight and a third cents a pound. Quack medicine, paper money, and Grant campaign buttons flooded the country. And Edwin Booth was making his first midland tour since the tragedy of Ford's Theatre in Washington.

It was the decade following the Civil War.

On a certain evening in November, Miss Judith Amory stood before her mirror in an Indiana boardinghouse and dressed to go to the theater. Her chin was tilted at a belligerent angle and for good reason. She was going alone. Without male escort, without even a female companion, she was going to an evening performance of Macbeth. It would have been a daring thing to do even in her home city of Chicago. In provincial Terre Haute it was unheard of. Sheltered young ladies who had no one to take them to the theater remained at home and embroidered chaste mottoes on sofa pillows or played sentimental ballads on the piano. But Miss Judith Amory was not a sheltered young lady. She was an extremely competent young woman who had been taking care of herself for more years than she cared to admit and was perfectly capable of going anywhere alone. Besides, she had never seen Cushman and Booth together.

Any one of the widows or spinsters in Mrs. Prewitt's Genteel Boarding Establishment for Ladies would have been pleased to accompany Miss Amory as her guest. But none of therp would have considered the excursion worth the price of a theater ticket. By the same token, neither did Judith consider their company worth the price. Autumn was well advanced and she had not yet secured a position for the winter. It was really the height of extravagance for an unemployed teacher of English literature to squander two dollars on a balcony seat.

But that only lent zest to the indulgence.

She dressed with care, prolonging the pleasures of anticipation. First the cotton chemise, then the corsets laced to exactly nineteen inches, then the short muslin petticoat, then the long plain petticoat, then the full ruffled petticoat, then the ruffled petticoat with tucks and embroidery, then the petticoat with lace-edged ruffles, and finally the sheer cambric petticoat flounced to the waist with ruffles on each flounce. Last of all the full gathered skirt of blue poplin with the tight buttoned bodice and the black velvet ribbon at the waist. There was also a black velvet ribbon around her bare white throat. Velvet neck ribbons were the fashion, and Judith was fortunate. On her long slender neck they were becoming.

She looked very well when dressed. She had a slim graceful figure and a thin eager face to which excitement lent a glow which gave an illusion of beauty. Yet she was not beautiful. Her eyes were too close together, her nose too long, her mouth too wide. But sparkling animation, a provocative manner, and a low pleasing voice made her attractive, particularly to the opposite sex. Given wealth and family background, she might have made a very good marriage. But without a tie in the world, without a dollar she had not earned, she had small chance of even meeting an eligible man, much less marrying one. She faced this fact and accepted it. Since she could not bring herself to marry any of the men whom it was possible to meet and could not manage to meet any of the men she would choose to marry, this charming young woman was, at the age of twenty-five, still Miss Judith Amory.

Mrs. Prewitt's ladies were in the back parlor when Judith came downstairs. The opening strains of "I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls" warned that someone was at the piano and about to burst into song. At sight of Judith in jacket and toque and carrying her small velvet muff, the music stopped and the ladies turned with flattering interest to the stairs.

"Miss Judith! You are going out?"

"I'm going to the theater."

"The theater!" This from the widow of a Methodist bishop.

"I'm going to see Macbeth."

"Oh." A sigh of doubtful relief granted partial absolution. After all, Shakespeare was sometimes mistaken for the Bible.

Mrs. Prewitt, a motherly Mrs. Grundy, smiled on Judith and brought another lamp.

"I'll put a light for you in the front parlor, my dear. You won't want me bringing your gentleman friend back here."

Judith braced herself. "I'm not expecting a gentleman, Mrs. Prewitt. I'm going alone." And then, with the sound of a concerted gasp behind her and the vision of Mrs. Prewitt's plump face settling like a shocked cheese, she went swiftly out the street door before the word "Alone!" could explode behind her.

"Well!" said the bishop's widow. "That's what comes of being born and brought up in Chicago."

According to Terre Haute standards, Chicago was what had risen from the ashes when Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.

Judith, meantime, had caught the horse trolley on the next street and was rolling away to town without being in any way molested.

"It's ridiculous," she fumed inwardly, "for women to be unable to go where they please by themselves. Someday they will. Someday women will do everything men do and nothing will be thought of it. But it will probably take another war to do it. Women are greater slaves than the Negroes ever were."

But she could not let her irritation annoy her now. She possessed one of those fortunate dispositions (fortunate to the owner, at least) which enables one to concentrate on his immediate purpose to the exclusion of all else. Her immediate purpose was to enjoy her evening's excursion. No annoyance was sufficient to distract her interest.

The horsecar dropped her two blocks from the theater. She hurried briskly through the November darkness. City streets at night did not alarm her. Descending from Chicago cabs and trolleys with her father was among her earliest recollections. She thrilled to lighted street lamps and busy pavements. But advance notices had warned that the performance started punctually at eight o'clock. She did not want to miss the thrill of that first curtain.

The theater lobby milled with the cream of Midwest society. Calmly, determinedly, Judith pushed her way through bouffant petticoats and satin-lined opera capes, her head high, her assurance so impeccable that people making way for her failed to notice that no escort hovered at her elbow. But when she had gained the sanctuary of the dimly lit theater it took all her savoir-faire to present her ticket to the brisk young usher and murmur in reply to his astonished eyebrows, "There is no one with me."

She had chosen her balcony seat for two reasons. It was cheaper; also, it rendered her solitary state less conspicuous. But as she felt the eyes following her lone progress down the shallow steps to first-row center, second seat from the aisle, she wished for a moment that she had not been at such pains to get the best possible reservation. She would have been less noticeable farther back.

But seated, and sufficiently rallied to look down on the proscenium directly opposite and only a little below her, she congratulated herself that she had one of the choice seats in the house and she didn't give a continental how many people were looking at her.

The aisle seat on her right was vacant. On her left a family-party composed of father, mother, and two half-grown daughters gave her a half-guilty feeling of protection. For all her brave insouciance, she was keenly conscious of being alone. When the mother in the family changed places with her husband, thus taking the seat next Judith, that independent young woman was shamelessly relieved. She even smiled at the woman, making some small remark, in the hope that people behind her might take her for a late-arriving member of the party. She began to speculate on the chance of the aisle seat remaining unoccupied.

The house filled rapidly. A trap door in the orchestra pit yawned and disgorged musicians and instruments. In a

short while the house hghts would dim. Meantime, there was the fascinating distraction of the program.

PRESENTING

MR. EDWIN BOOTH &

MISS CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN

IN

MACBETH

A Play

by

William Shakespeare

She had no need to read the cast. The supporting players were unfamiliar, unimportant, many of them recruited locally. Booth was notorious for his carelessness in minor casting. But who cared? What difference did it make who read the lines of ghosts and porters when Cushman and Booth read the immortal dialogues.

Act I, Scene I An Open Place.

It was not a theater with a drop curtain and an orchestra tuning its instruments. It was a caldron where witches brewed enchantment.

This moment of expectancy. This moment of burning cheeks and icy hands, while music played and chattering voices gradually hushed and lamps dimmed slowly to dusk before the glowing footlights of a stage. This moment before the rising of the curtain was worth all the adventure had cost her.

A large and substantial presence sank into the seat on the aisle and made quite a commotion shedding a bulky coat. She neither saw nor felt the intrusion. She was conscious of nothing but Act I, Scene I—An Open Place.

Not till the lights came up at the end of the act did she move. Through the scene changes she sat tense, leaning slightly forward, oblivious of her surroundings. When the

filial words came in the great tragedian's matchless voice, " 'False face must hide what the false heart doth know, " and the curtain slowly descended, she roused like a sleeper from a drugged slumber and sat limply back in her seat.

It was then that she became aware of her new neighbor.

He, too, was relaxing as though from the grip of tension. Remembering just in time that she was a lady, she did not look at him but assiduously studied her program. The family on her left were having open discussion on the merits of the production. The youngest daughter, in pigtails and hair bows, was disappointed in the Witches. They had not been gruesome enough.

The man on Judith's right was having trouble with his greatcoat. There was no place to put it that was not in someone's way. He murmured apologies which Judith quite properly ignored. He was a tall man, and his long legs took up more than his share of room without a heavy cloak piled on his knees. She wondered why he didn't check it.

And then the lights began dimming again and she forgot the man and his troublesome coat.

At the next intermission a number of people went down to the lobby to stretch their legs. The family on her left departed. Judith was left in her seat beside the stranger.

Why didn't he go out too? It was the gentlemen mostly who were leaving.

But instead he arranged his coat over the back of his seat and settled himself to study his program. Judith likevidse kept her eyes glued to the folder which she now knew by heart. But every nerve was tingling. The women beside her had left the balcony, the women behind her were waiting for their escorts; but, worst of all, the man beside her knew that she was unattended. If she had had presence of mind she would have followed the family party out and no one would have been the wiser.

And then her modern scorn for conventions reasserted

itself. Rules of conduct were for timid people, not for Miss Judith Amory. Defiantly she turned her head—and found herself looking straight into the eyes of the man beside her. Whether he had been watching her, or wheTher their eyes met by accident, they both looked swiftly away.

But she was no longer uneasy, nor even embarrassed. The man whose eyes she had just encountered would never annoy a woman.

She began to steal surreptitious glances at him from under lowered lids, at first lifting her eyes no higher than his hands. Long, well-shaped hands, but with nails pared close and skin redly clean as from much scrubbing. The sleeves of his coat were worn at the wTist, as though the fabric were not new, yet it was a broadcloth sleeve and the wristband beneath it was linen. Judith's eyes moved upward and caught the gleam of a heavy gold chain across a broad expanse of smoke-gray vest and the flowing ends of a carelessly knotted silk tie. His dress was that of a gentleman, yet his hands did not look like her father's. She wondered who and what he might be.

Then her eyes moved higher and she forgot about his hands.

His head, she decided, should have belonged on George Rogers Clark. It was beautifully molded, covered with thick, curling brown hair, and he carried it like a man accustomed to looking over the heads of lesser men. His face was bronzed as though from long exposure to sun and wind, and the blue of his eyes was in such startling contrast that they seemed to smolder with blue flames. This was no man about town. This was no townsman at all. Hands, face, physique set him apart from the pallid city folk who filled the theater.